From Side Project for Internal Use to Viable Standalone Company

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?

Hi there. I'm Gary Bury. My background is accountancy, but for the last 10 years I've been involved in internet based startups. Three years ago I set on a path with Matt Roberts to make Timetastic (a simple app for booking and tracking time off work) a commercial success, and it's going well — very well!

Originally Timetastic was a side project of Mediaburst, built primarily for internal use, but with a modicum of marketing to bring on clients. It'd got to about £1,000 of monthly revenue, but costs outweighed the revenue and as a side product of a larger company it'd never get the attention it needed to thrive.

The critical moment arose in October 14 when Mediaburst was bought by a larger company. Timetastic wasn't part of that deal so Matt and I created a company, left our secure well paid jobs, and set to work on Timetastic full time.

Three years down the line and we have ~100,000 users, our monthly revenue was £31.5k in August 17, and it consistently increases by £2k a month.

But the beauty is that the revenue is derived from over 8,000 relatively small accounts. So although we sport some large well-known brands (Buffer, Tony & Guy, Pepsi, Specsavers) we have no reliance on any large accounts. And let's be honest, well-known brands are nice for vanity, but the objective is a reliable list of paying customers, irrespective of their brand or public profile.

What motivated you to get started with Timetastic?

You could say Timetastic was a product born out of frustration. When I started at Mediaburst they had a hideously over-complex process to take a day off. The admin burden for me and my team was frustrating. It was crazy, all this bureaucratic paper-based stuff to work through, just to get a day off work.

We tried some of the products already out there but remained frustrated. It just wasn't smooth enough for us and that feeling just kept eating away at us, and naturally one day we took the plunge.

As a side project the original spec was very limited, based on our company and our company alone. As long as it worked for us that was all that mattered. The decision to make it commercially available didn't impact the functionality. We'd just put a website up and if it fitted their organisation they could use it.

After Matt and I took it on we widened the scope, to make a commercial success we had to widen its appeal, and that's what we've been doing ever since.

What went into building the initial product?

Initially Timetastic was built in Ruby, but we found limitations with hosting and scaling. The second build was in PHP, but with eventual pressure (persuasion, he'd say!) from Matt we decided to embrace the Microsoft stack and to re-write in .Net — that's our core background and developer skillset.

I guess we were fortunate that the initial build was financed as a side project by our employer, but from October 14 it was all down to us. The existing revenues didn't cover the running expenses (nevermind any thought of a salary and marketing).

Programs like Microsoft Bizspark have been massively helpful. A whole host of free developer software and a sizeable discount on hosting provided a certain amount of relief. We also looked for subscription-based software, to avoid any significant capital outlay.

Those initial months were the most nerve-racking, with the garden-variety concerns: "We are injecting large chunks of hard earned money. Will it be a success or not? Did we make the right decision?"

But the revenues started to grow consistently and we realised it's just a matter of time before we stop injecting funds and can start to pay ourselves. Within 18 months we'd grown sufficiently that the money could flow the other way — a huge relief. In total we'd had to put in £40k to get profitable.

How have you attracted users and grown Timetastic?

Attracting users is probably the biggest challenge any web business will encounter. Indeed, it continues to be for us. Contrary to popular belief and hockey stick predictions, people do not just find you on the internet. And just because we're doing over £30k of revenue doesn't mean we've nailed it and can sit back.

For the initial launch we got a few press articles, The Next Web in particular brought in a lot of signups and a small number of customers. But it was slow going. User numbers would creep up, adwords was volatile, sometimes we'd think we were winning, then suddenly our quality scores would crash and our ads would vanish.

So while Timetastic was a side project, it grew at a snail's pace, and things didn't start to pick up significantly until we went full time. Since then we've seen a steady increase in monthly revenue growth, driven by a number of factors:

Increased Flexibility

In our quest to produce a simple product we'd failed to consider that annual leave is wrapped up in employment contracts and company policies, things that don't flex well to our simple product. To improve conversion rates we needed to make Timetastic more flexible, but without destroying usability.

So for three years we've painstakingly increased the functionality and flexibility. You can see our progress on our changelog; a small tweak here, a function there, but it's all added up and our trail to paid conversion rate has gone from 5% to 30%. Making changes to improve that conversion rate continues to be a the best investment we made.

A single PR drive provides a one-time benefit. But better conversions have changed the success of all our future marketing.

Outsourced Adwords

We outsourced adwords management to a local PPC company that have made a success of that channel.

Adwords is not that simple, what appears a simple offering is horrendously complex to operate profitably and consistently. Understanding all the functionality and nuances of adwords is the difference between success and writing blank cheques to Google.

We now have a steady stream of conversions at a steady and profitable cost per conversion.

Negligible attrition

We are fortunate in that our product is what might be termed 'sticky'. We tend to only lose customers when either they cease trading, merge with a larger group, or move onto a more comprehensive HR system.

We might be lucky in that when companies embrace new systems they do stick with them, but I also believe having solid, good value product and is well supported contributes to a large degree.

What's your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

Timetastic's monetisation model is super simple. We're a subscription-based model: $1 per user per month (£0.50 if you are UK-based). No other options, no price tiers. Pay by debit/credit card each month. We just take the payment based on the number of live users you have on your billing date.

Although we often discuss it internally, we haven't changed the price since launch. Revenue has grown steadily each month, so any discussion about increasing price feels like a risk to that model, and we shy away from it. Maybe one day!

Revenue numbers for the last year are shown here. I've included our forecasts for September and October. Because we are subscriprion-based we know with a high degree of accuracy our future revenue.

As you can see, growth is nice and steady, doubling in the last 12 months. No hockey stick — just good solid stable growth. We love it.

Our overheads are relatively static. Salaries are the main one obviously. Gareth joined us earlier this year to help speed up development and give us better cover all round.

A few thousand on adwords. We've beefed up our Azure hosting recently and now spend ~£500 a month. There's no need to scrimp on hosting costs. It's important we operate a fast and stable app.

Another £500 goes on software each month. Freeagent, Zendesk, Github Customer.io, Sendgrid, Slack — the usual suite of web apps.

We try to choose software that's web-based and has a good mobile app or experience, so that we can work remotely with ease.

And card processing fees of course: over £1k a month. Unavoidable and too expensive!

If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

This is a really difficult question because we are so happy with the way things are working out at Timetastic. In many ways it's a product of the experience we've gained in other roles, running other apps — the mistakes we made there.

Maybe we could have taken on additional staff earlier on. Things might have accelerated faster.

Who knows what could have been? We are really happy with our decisions and live by them. We are not the kind to have a retrospective view. That mindset can be corrosive and lead to blame culture. You can get yourself buried in what could have been and why you never did. You are where you are — what you do next is more important.

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

It's worth mentioning how we set Timetastic up from an admin point of view. Often overlooked, it's the platform by which we've been able to to focus on the product and customer experience, and grow without needing to sell our right arms for VC capital.

From the outset we automated everything we could and setup systems that meant we weren't dealing with work that didn't add value.

What I mean is things like billing. We offer one price plan and one way of paying. We never negotiate on the price or payment mechanism. Every single customer pays the same, and with a credit/debit card on a monthly basis, without exception. It means we don't need a sales team or account managers to negotiate pricing. It's never a discussion internally or with clients. Super simple to administer and masses of time saved.

It also means we never have to chase payments, which is a horrid, morale- and time-sapping activity. If your payment fails we send you a polite email to update your details, and suspend your account.

Invoicing is fully integrated with accounting software and the bank feeds in directly. I spend less than two hours doing accounts-related work each month.

Support is online only. We work from home. No office or phone lines. No product demos. No recruitment agencies pestering up for an update.

As well as the cost savings it means we are never interrupted. It cuts out so much worthless activity. All our energy and focus is on productive, value-adding work. We talk a lot about usability improvements. We review and test ideas, always writing new code, always designing, looking at new marketing initiatives. It's a hugely positive environment.

Some of this sounds harsh towards our customers, but I assure you it's not. It's just a business model where the customers benefit from our focus.

Okay, so some choose not to work with us because they can't ring us, or pay by check 90 days after they used the service. But that's fine. There are companies out there better set up to provide that kind of service.

What's your advice for indie hackers who are just starting out?

Learn to say, 'No.' Not gratuitously. I'm suggesting that you get a handle on what the scope of your product and operation is, and stick with it. In doing so, 'no' and 'sorry' will be frequently used.

Customers will constantly try to pull you outside of that, not intentionally or maliciously, but they have a preferred way of working. It's easy to say yes. You're starting out, excitement can lead to a natural tendency to overstate the significance of their request, to believe it's a deal breaker.

And maybe the request doesn't feel like much of a departure, after all. You want the customer to be happy. But after you say yes 3 or 5 times you're building customer specific complexity into your operations, and you're stuck with it.

Just slow down and take time to consider, "Is it really a deal breaker?" In 99% of cases I've seen, those companies will be perfectly happy with your terms and processes. They were simply asking. So say, "No." Be confident. Say it nicely and with an apology. Tell them how you work, and they'll come on board.

Where can we go to learn more?

You can see or try Timetastic here: https://timetastic.co.uk.

Our company Twitter is @timetastic.

I'm always happy to answer any questions — just fire away in the comments below or find me on twitter gary_bury.

— GaryBury , Creator of Timetastic

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